Search form

Acquia Coverage

Whether you want to call it open core or open source or something else entirely, the software as a service business model has been gaining popularity.

Among the companies that have achieved financial success while having open source software at its core is Acquia, co-founded by the original developer of the Drupal Project, Dries Buytaert. I had the opportunity today to chat via phone with Buytaert and Acquia's CEO, Tom Erickson, about Drupal, Acquia's business model and the future of open source.

Every few years, Drupal violates one of the industry's most sacred rules: don't break your APIs.

The next version of the popular open source content management system – Drupal 7 – will do just that. And more. It will offer a redesigned user interface that targets – gasp! – non-technical users. It will hide features that devs know and love.

Acquia released a new social software suite this week they are calling Drupal Commons. It's an open-source alternative to the proprietary Enterprise 2.0 suites we've written about quite often here. Acquia's Jay Batson was full of optimism about it when he wrote: "Time--once again--for open source to go blow the doors off another proprietary software cathedral." In this case, the cathedral is social software suites.

In the open source software community, there's considerable nervousness about paying people to work on volunteer-driven projects. For example, Joomla recently hired some developers to work on its core software, a decision that has caused much debate in the Joomla community.

Acquia, a commercial open source software company that provides products, services and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system, has selected Gluster's open source storage solutions.

With the impressive rise of Drupal over the past several years, a number of consulting and integration firms have emerged with specific expertise in Drupal. The best known of these is Acquia, the “commercial arm” of Drupal, providing products, services, and technical support. Recently Acquia began distributing a community platform called “Commons”. We caught up with co-founder Jay Batson to ask about Commons, and its role in the online community sector.

The tension between configuration and programming is an enduring problem that is familiar to anyone who has had to attempt to run their business using a software application. Drupal Gardens is combining principles of open source to the Software as a Service model to find a way to get the best of both worlds.

The fact that Drupal creator Dries Buytaert’s Acquia is a success is not news.
The size of that success can be difficult to measure, given the company remains in private hands. But today we have some numbers and the answer is it’s pretty successful.

Fresh off of an $8.5 million round of funding that was announced earlier today, Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert is feeling pretty good about the open source business model. The company that he co-founded in 2007 sells software and products that leverage Drupal, the open source project he started in 2000.

Techies know that Drupal is more than just fun to say; it's also an open source software platform that people use to build and manage Web sites — especially sites where users can contribute content and participate in online communities. Drupal was originally created almost a decade ago by Dries Buytaert, a Belgian computer scientist.

Acquia, a Boston-based commercial open source software company that provides a set of tools and network services for the Drupal social publishing system, has raised $8.5 million in third-round funding. The financing comes from existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners together with Acquia CEO Tom Erickson.

The distributed, open-source SaaS model will expand the range of available software.

Right now if you think about the way software-as-a-service is delivered, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google are the most commonly cited examples. All these companies deliver their software using what is known as the multitenant model. Just as multitenant software knocked on-premise vendors for a loop, new distributed, open-source models for delivery of SaaS software will have a powerful impact.

Acquia announced recently they were releasing a new tool called Drupal Gardens that makes it easier to create websites using the popular open source Drupal platform. In a recent blog post Acquia VP of Marketing, Lynne Capozzi wrote about how, rightly or wrongly, some people are intimidated by the idea of building a website using a tool like Drupal.

It's great for the power users who can build an understanding of how site building in Drupal works, but Drupal Gardens puts this in the hands of less technical end users. It provides an easy path to creating the site, then choosing a theme (either provided or one you create on your own), color schemes, fonts and so forth.

Social networking true believers use words like engagement, responsibility, and transparency that smack of the Internet's hippie days in the late 1990s, yet social networking has proved to be much more than a passing fancy. The exploding numbers associated with the most popular sites like Facebook and Twitter inspire awe in even the most jaded statisticians. Time spent on social networks increased 277% in the United States last year, according to media research firm Nielsen, and Twitter itself grew more than 500%.
Now the social media category is primed to emerge as the most significant business enabler since the Internet itself. Organizations must ask themselves seven important questions about their plans for leveraging social networking over the next 12 months. Their answers may spell the difference between success and failure in the coming decade.